If Google and Facebook are to pay, they must be obliged to do so, just as industrial capitalists have come to be obliged to contribute to the financing of the social state through compulsory contributions. This model must be reinvented today, and we could imagine states – or better still the European Union – subjecting major platforms to taxation in order to finance a social right to the contribution open to individuals.

We must sign the peace treaty: we need a lasting agreement that doesn’t insist upon dividing the world between those who know and those who don’t; an armistice to liberate the world from the arrogance of experts.

Our revamped website brought along another major change: our bits are since then hosted at the Servidor Libre de Trayectorias Tecnológicas, managed by Hacklab Cochabamba via Codigo Sur and with the support of Hivos.

The hacker culture is capable of reversing the relationships at play in the contribution economy. Hacking means appropriating tools and networks to put them to other uses. We’re amateurs, yes, but rebel amateurs…

This interview with P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens was originally conducted in Spanish, with consecutive translation by our friend Andrés Delgado. For our blog, We’ve translated the questions in text and kept Michel’s audio answers in English.

“In traditional contracts, each party is free to decide whether to fulfill the contract, whether to only partially implement the contract (by leaving out some obligations), or whether to breach the contract (and pay instead for damages or compensation). By contrast, in the case of smart contracts, parties have no choice but to implement the contract, because the contract has been encoded, written into the code. It cannot be breached unless one actually manages to break into the code.”

An interview with Enric Duran, who’s currently busy organizing the FairCoop Open Cooperative, a community-built effort to alleviate global economic inequalities through the use of mutual credit, reputation systems and cryptocurrencies.

“But it has to be noted that the world of the existing collaborative economy has a divided soul: one side has much to do with P2P, the communal and the free software community that are by no means in the majority.”